Thursday, November 24, 2016

V-Live Store opens

For you K-pop fans, Naver's streaming music video service V Live now has an online store when you can purchase "exclusive contents" like emoticons and stickers of your favorite idols' faces (I don't know why, but seeing "콘텐츠" always rubs me the wrong way, like when people call a PowerPoint presentation a "UCC").

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Naver now lets you sign up for a Naver ID by logging into Naver using an SNS account, currently either Facebook or Line. This is a simple first step to using a full Naver account, and the sign-up process is entirely available in English.

Naver login page, with SNS login options

I say "first step" because you will be prompted to fill out your profile details fully, as you would be required to do if you joined via e-mail address. For that you'll need to add an email address and mobile phone contact to receive an SMS text message verification code.

You can postpone all that for a while and use this SNS-linked account for most Naver services, (I tested it out with a dummy SNS account), but at some point (took about a week for me), it will require you to finish the proper sign-up. Seems like a way to lure you into signing up the normal way.

To be fair, adding an email address and a mobile number (it doesn't have to be a Korean phone: any number will work) isn't too much to ask. Of course you won't be able to fully utilize services like Naver Pay or other money-related activities, but the "email & phone number" account will work fine for utilizing most all the non-pay services. At least, I haven't had any issues with my Naver account, but to be honest I don't use it all that much anymore.

I can remember when the sign-up was all in Korean and we needed screenshot tutorials explaining step-by-step how to get a Naver ID. Now all it takes is one click with your Facebook. The foreigner-friendly march at Naver HQ continues.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Recommended read: "South Korea's Progressives Need to Grow Up in the Age of Trump"

At the risk of exposing some of my political leanings (which, anyway, are not very gung-ho in any direction), this was a deeply interesting commentary on the left wing reactions to the whole scandal with President Park and potential issues with a new President Trump.

... should South Korean progressives be tempted to return to their old ways and exploit anti-American sentiments again for any reason whatsoever, Trump’s likely braggadocious response would be less genteel than President George W. Bush’s response was while he was in the White House. Overt acts of anti-Americanism aside, one of the things that Trump ran on was for American allies to become more active in their own self-defense and to increase their share of joint-military budgets with the United States. It’s obvious how further South Korean attempts to maintain the status quo or push away Japan, which weakens the trilateral alliance (and we know what Trump thinks about perceptions of weakness), would be perceived in Washington.The Korean Foreigner: South Korea's Progressives Need to Grow Up in the Age of Trump

This touches on something I have been thinking about. Koreans, especially the left-leaning ones, overwhelmingly supported Hillary. Just look at this headline, from, you guessed it, Hankoreh:

What I've been thinking, though, is how much a President Trump and the Korean left might actually have in common. Both seem to want American military presence in Korea reduced or removed entirely. Both seem against free trade deals between Korea and US. Trump is happy to devolve or reduce Korean dependence on big bad America and let Korea enact its own might (even to the point of nuclear weapons). I bet if you asked him, Trump would think laying down the cash for THAAD is a dumb idea. Under a Trump presidency, the Korean left could potentially be in a position to get some of the things they've wanted for a long time. But I haven't heard any cheers for his administration. Maybe the noise here at home is just too deafening right now.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

ALTools, the suite from Korea's ESTsoft, which you might recognize as that cute little pill that tries to open all the zip files on your work computer, has a new program called ALPDF (Al as in Al Bundy + PDF) aka "알PDF".

I mention it because it lets you convert between all the usual Office formats, but also Hangul's HWP file format. So could be another free tool in your arsenal for opening/converting/printing hwp files. You can grab the app here, for Windows only:

The download is about 50MB, and while the set-up is pretty straight forward, the instructions and app itself are all in Korean. So you might be better off checking out some of my other posts on opening Hangul HWP files.

Just something cute I found out that I didn't know about. President Park Geun-hye has several Jindo dogs, named Peace, Unification, Geumgang, Halla & Baekdu (평화, 통일, 금강, 한라, 백두). Aww. Now those are some cute puppy names. Better than, uh, "Gil Ra Im" 😏 Man I'm a sucker for cute dog photos. Though give me a real sized dog any day over these little squirts.

What can I say? I like to look on the light side of controversies. If you ask me (and you didn't), I'd say that as a leader, she's not one. But it's more the sinister vultures around her I'm afraid of. I mean look at this photo. This is exactly the sort of life she was used to. Perhaps a bit stunted in that princess phase. But so what? If you ask me (and you didn't), her party should never have pushed for her. It's not precisely that I think she should resign or be impeached. It's more that she probably shouldn't have been president in the first place. But with President Trump on the way, that's a pretty rich comment from me.

UPDATE 2017-2: And the pooches became an afterthought after her impeachment. This bothers me mainly because it calls to mind a general trend of dog abandonment that I never can get over. I mean:

The family of dogs consists of a male-female pair, which Park had received as a gift from her neighbors when she left her home in Samseong-dong for the presidential residence in 2013Korea Times | Ousted Park blamed for abandoning dogs

So why not just contact those same neighbors now that you're all local buddies again and arrange for them to either take in the dogs or find homes? Terrible.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Today (well, yesterday) was Suneung day here in Korea, which you might have noticed in the morning since many offices and shops opened an hour or two later than usual to give a wide berth to the high school kids making their ways to other schools. And yes, the planes were stopped again.

I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the questions that were on today's test. These are from the English section of course. And although it's 2016, they'd call this the 2017 test since it's for kids entering college next year.

Pencil ready?

Selected Suneung Questions 2017

#21 - Identify the correct theme of the passage

The precision of the lines on the map, the consistency with which symbols are used, the grid and/or projection system, the apparent certainty with which place names are written and placed, and the legend and scale information all give the map an aura of scientific accuracy and objectivity. Although subjective interpretation goes into the construction of these cartographic elements, the finished map appears to express an authoritative truth about the world, separate from any interests and influences. The very trust that this apparent objectivity inspires is what makes maps such powerful carriers of ideology. However unnoticeably, maps do indeed reflect the world views of either their makers or, more probably, the supporters of their makers, in addition to the political and social conditions under which they were made. Some of the simple ideological messages that maps can convey include: This land is and has long been ours; here is the center of the universe; if we do not claim this land, the enemies you most fear will.

① the conditions essential to making a map accurate
② political and social conflicts caused by maps
③ subjectivity defining the creativity of map-making
④ the authority derived from trustworthy maps
⑤ ideologies lying beneath the objectivity of maps

#23 - Identify the correct theme of the passage

The film director, as compared to the theater director, has as his material, the finished, recorded celluloid. This material from which his final work is composed consists not of living men or real landscapes, not of real, actual stage-sets, but only of their images, recorded on separate strips that can be shortened, altered, and assembled according to his will. The elements of reality are fixed on these pieces; by combining them in his selected sequence, shortening and lengthening them according to his desire, the director builds up his own “filmic” time and “filmic” space. He does not adapt reality, but uses it for the creation of a new reality, and the most characteristic and important aspect of this process is that, in it, laws of space and time invariable and inescapable in work with actuality become obedient. The film assembles from them a new reality proper only to itself.
① Film Making: Exploration into the Unknown
② A Filmic World: Lost in Time and Space
③ Innovative Technology in Film Editing
④ A Reality in the Film Director’s Hands
⑤ The Director’s Reality Never Changes

#28 - Choose the incorrect word

When people face real adversity ─ disease, unemployment, or the disabilities of age ─ affection from a pet takes on new meaning. A pet’s continuing affection becomes crucially important for ① those enduring hardship because it reassures them that their core essence has not been damaged. Thus pets are important in the treatment of ② depressed or chronically ill patients. In addition, pets are ③ used to great advantage with the institutionalized aged. In such institutions it is difficult for the staff to retain optimism when all the patients are declining in health. Children who visit cannot help but remember ④ what their parents or grandparents once were and be depressed by their incapacities. Animals, however, have no expectations about mental capacity. They do not worship youth. They have no memories about what the aged once ⑤ was and greet them as if they were children. An old man holding a puppy can relive a childhood moment with complete accuracy. His joy and the animal’s response are the same.

#30 - Which "he/his" pronoun refers to someone different than rest?

Dr. Paul Odland and his friend Bob travel frequently to South America, where they provide free medical treatment for disabled children of poor families. One day, they went to a local marketplace. Paul wanted to buy some souvenirs, and ① he spotted a carving that he liked. The non-English speaking seller was asking 500 pesos for the carving. With Bob acting as interpreter, Paul offered 300 and ② his opponent proposed 450. The bargaining in the noisy market became spirited, even intense, with Paul stepping up ③ his price slightly and the seller going down slowly. The pace increased so fast that Bob could not keep up with the back-and-forth interpretation. Meanwhile, observing the seller carefully, Paul sensed something wrong in Bob’s interpretation. In fact, the seller had gone below Paul’s last offer. When Paul raised his doubt, Bob instantly recognized the error and corrected ④ his interpretation. At length, they settled the deal, and ⑤ he was delighted to purchase the carving at a reasonable price and thanked Bob.

#32 - Fill in the blank

Temporal resolution is particularly interesting in the context of satellite remote sensing. The temporal density of remotely sensed imagery is large, impressive, and growing. Satellites are collecting a great deal of imagery as you read this sentence. However, most applications in geography and environmental studies do not require extremely fine-grained temporal resolution. Meteorologists may require visible, infrared, and radar information at sub-hourly temporal resolution; urban planners might require imagery at monthly or annual resolution; and transportation planners may not need any time series information at all for some applications. Again, the temporal resolution of imagery used should _______________________. Sometimes researchers have to search archives of aerial photographs to get information from that past that pre-date the collection of satellite imagery.
① be selected for general purposes
② meet the requirements of your inquiry
③ be as high as possible for any occasion
④ be applied to new technology by experts
⑤ rely exclusively upon satellite information

#35 - Which sentence does not belong?

Most often, you will find or meet people who introduce themselves in terms of their work or by what they spend time on. These people introduce themselves as a salesman or an executive. ① There is nothing criminal in doing this, but psychologically, we become what we believe. ② Identifying what we can do in the workplace serves to enhance the quality of our professional career. ③ People who follow this practice tend to lose their individuality and begin to live with the notion that they are recognized by the job they do. ④ However, jobs may not be permanent, and you may lose your job for countless reasons, some of which you may not even be responsible for. ⑤ In such a case, these people suffer from an inevitable social and mental trauma, leading to emotional stress and a feeling that all of a sudden they have been disassociated from what once was their identity.

#36 - Place the three specified passages in the correct order.

Interestingly, being observed has two quite distinct
effects on performance. In some cases, performance is
decreased, even to the point of non-existence. The
extreme of this is stage fright, the sudden fear of public
performance.
(A) So, if you are learning to play a new sport, it is better to
begin it alone, but when you become skilled at it, then
you will probably perform better with an audience.
(B) There are many instances of well-known actors who, in
mid-career, develop stage fright and simply cannot
perform. The other extreme is that being observed
enhances performance, people doing whatever it might
be better when they know that others are watching.
(C) The general rule seems to be that if one is doing
something new or for the first time, then being observed
while doing it decreases performance. On the other hand,
being observed while doing some task or engaging in
some activity that is well known or well practiced tends
to enhance performance.
① (A) － (C) － (B)
② (B) － (A) － (C)
③ (B) － (C) － (A)
④ (C) － (A) － (B)
⑤ (C) － (B) － (A)

How did you do? Tune in tomorrow for the answers. Just kidding. Here you go:

"Friendly Fails" & other suneung musings

Regarding the test, I learned something I thought was pretty interesting today while chatting about the test with a coworker. I'll call them "friendly fails".

You may already know that many universities have special early admissions, for example for students who were outstanding in certain subjects and have sparkling school grades, or a school record filled with awards and extracurricular activities. Or even some students who lived abroad and excel in a foreign languages and pass the university interview. The nice thing about early admission is you can beat the crowd and learn your acceptance status earlier (duh). The catch is that if they accept you, you essentially are bound to go. No waiting to see who else will accept you. You made your choice by applying to the early admission track.

Anyway, students who get granted early admission will usually know their result before Suneung day, meaning that for some kids, despite their years of study, they may not actually need to sit the test. Their scores are irrelevant; they already got their "in".

But some of them will attend the Suneung test anyway, and purposefully fail it, purposefully choosing answers they know to be wrong. They believe that by doing this, they are contributing to lowering the average nationwide score set, which will help make their friends, who desperately need a high school, seem to have done "better" than the national average. If lots of students did poorly (or seem to have done poorly), then your mediocre score seems relatively higher (and this is a test where relativity is everything). If not for the entire test, they can do this for particular subjects that they know they won't be submitting (like a second foreign language score for a science major, etc.)

You guess is as good as mine as whether this actually works and has any effect (I doubt it), but it could be a nice sort of moral support or mental charm for the serious takers.

I was also told a rumor that any student who gets 0%, a total failure, is automatically granted admission to Seoul National University, because anybody able to beat the statistics and purposefully fail every single question is obviously a genius who knew every answer's correct choice and skillfully avoided it. Take that for what you will.

Caveat: I am not an expert on the Korean education system. There are details I could be getting wrong. I have never taken this test nor applied to college here. That's probably good because I doubt I'd have made the cut.

Best wishes for all yesterday's test takers and for their college dreams! Now they've earned the right to lame-duck their way through the rest of the year. If you've got coworkers with high school 3rd-grader kids, show them some love. This could be the most worrisome time for them as their kid's acceptance (and rejection) letters start pouring in.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The Naver app has a section in the settings called "Labs" (네앱연구소), where you can optionally enable a few neat features. If you're familiar with G-mail's labs settings, it's very similar. Here's a quick rundown of the features offered.

To get there:

open the Naver app

tap the main Menu button in the upper left

tap the gear icon

choose 네앱연구소 (My App Lab), which is the only option under the 연구 중인 기능 section.

Here's what you'll see, with English translation:

Naver app "Labs" settings (네앱연구소) currently available

Naver App "Labs" section settings

Naver app Labs features

Topic auto-cleaner 안 보는 주제 자동 정리

This feature will automatically remove categories from your main Naver homepage if you haven't interacted with them in a user-set amount of time (30, 60, or 90 days). For example, if you never view the "Sports" section, then the app will eventually remove the sports section for you, and present more content for the sections you actually do browse.

Fonts글꼴

Changes the fonts used in the app. You'll be asked to download a 16MB font package if you choose this. Interestingly, it seems over 70% of those who use this feature are women. I'm going to guess they're using "Choco Cooky."

Lock Screen잠금 화면

Requires you to input a passcode for using the app. KakaoTalk also uses this feature. I don't know if it's just me, but I've noticed most coworkers do utilize this feature. I don't get it, myself. I guess they let others use their phones but want to keep the chats private. I never share my phone, so the default system-wide lock screen is fine by me.

Naver Home cover photo네이버홈 커버

Changes the cover photo, i.e. the image behind the search box at the top of the app. You can replace the classic trademark green box with your own custom image from your phone or choose one of the cute Google Now-style images.

Here's an example from me that looks pretty bad. Maybe I need a better banner logo. If you want your own custom perfect photo here, make sure you choose one sized 800 x 277 pixels to fit perfectly.

Naver App with custom banner image

Here's the setting to choose the image, which shows some of the cute default choices offered. I couldn't figure out where these are stored. I'd like to download them and use them myself.

You can also see some other nice examples, many of which are either people's baby photos or K-pop stars, here.

Naver Home MyBoard네이버홈 MY판

This lets you add your own custom category to the Naver homepage, right alongside "News," "Weather," "Sports," etc. For example, you could add a section for your favorite website and have it easily accessible. Mobile-friendly websites are best to add here. If you're browsing the web through the Naver app's built-in browser, there will also be a "send to MyBoard" option (looks like a hashtag) to add that page/site as a custom category.

For example, I added my blog as a custom board. Here's what it looks like on my Naver homepage:

I tried adding the RSS feed but it didn't work. It seems to work better with Naver services pages, but any mobile-friendly site will do.

Naver Light Home라이트홈

Allows you to use the newish Naver Light home theme instead of the default Naver homepage. This is a lighter-weight version of the Naver home that loads faster and has more Google Now-style cards. I wrote a short post about Naver Light Home here:10원 Tips: Naver Light Home, a new homepage for trips abroad

Custom Toolbar커스텀 툴바

Wow, in the couple of days since I took the screenshot, Naver Labs already added this new feature, so it's not in the photo here. You can customize the toolbar, which is the floating menu that remains at the bottom of the page in the Naver app's built-in browser.

Secret mode시크릿 모드

Basically just their name for "In Cognito" mode. Browse with this turned on, and it will delete your search/browsing history.

Screen capture editor캡처 에디터

A fancy way to take and edit screen shots.

Keypad slider키패드 슬라이더

This is handy if you do a lot of manual URL editing. We know it's annoying to try to slide the cursor with your finger through that tiny URL box up top. This adds a slider button so that you can more easily get the cursor in the exact spot you want. I can imagine this really useful to a few people, and useless to most.

Suspicious connection protection수상한 연결 탐지기

Warns you when your Wi-Fi connection might be spoofed, especially for public Wi-Fi use. As it says itself: if you never see its message pop up, then good!

Gesture drawing제스처 그리기

You can navigate by drawing large gestures on the screen. You can draw these gestures:

"N" to go home

"<" or ">" to go backward and forward

"^" or "V" to go to the top or bottom of the page

"W" to go to the URL input bar

"ㅁ" to open a new tab

"S" to cancel/refresh.

I tried this for awhile, and while it was a bit cool at first, it became bothersome and I disabled it.

Night mode나이트 모드

Not a dark theme, but instead puts a red tint over everything, to reduce blue light and help you sleep at night. I already use a nice quality app called Twilight for this system-wide.

And that's it.

Now if only they'd take the plunge and have "English interface" as a labs setting...

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Here's a way of editing the font and text styles on your Blogger blog's mobile view. This will be useful if your blog's mobile view is showing a generic font instead of the customized fonts you chose for the desktop view.

To make it work and get those pretty fonts on the mobile view, we just need to do two things:

Add a few lines of code to the template to load the fonts we are using

Add a few lines of CSS to display them in the mobile view

Before I get into that, let me show you an example of what I mean. You can scroll down to Section B if you want to jump right into the code.

Section A - Example of a blog not displaying the right fonts in mobile view

Example blog nicely customized in the desktop editor

Let's look at an example. Here's a test blog I made using one of the "Awesome Inc" default templates. In the template editor (Template → Customize), I chose a variety of interesting and neat-looking fonts automatically provided in Blogger's drop-down lists.

Even though Blogger's default templates' styles are a bit out of date, they can be made to look modern and smooth mostly just by using better fonts at larger sizes. Anyway, here's what I came up with.

Desktop view, utilizing a variety of fonts

I wanted a variety, so I'm using these fonts in that blog:

Post titles font = Kenia

Date header font = Syncopate

Blog title font = Cherry Cream Soda

Blog description font = Chewy

Overall Page font = Fontdiner Swanky

OK, looks good there on desktop view. But what happens when I check out the mobile view -- even when the mobile template selector is set at "Custom" as it should be? It doesn't show the right fonts.

Example failure to apply customized fonts to the mobile template

The mobile view ends up looking like this:

The variety of fonts all revert to generic fonts in the mobile view

You can see that all the customized fonts are gone.

The problem is that sometimes if you opt to use the nicer non-standard fonts on your blog, you'll notice that the desktop view of your blog looks great, but on a phone or other mobile device, those cool beautiful fonts don't show up. Instead, a generic font is used like above. This seems to happen to any text style that uses a font other than the standards:

Arial

Courier

Georgia

Impact

Times New Roman

Trebuchet

Verdana

These essential fonts are easily and automatically recognized by a mobile browser, but our special fonts (Chewy, Cherry Cream Soda, Kenia, etc.) are not. So we need to do those two things I mentioned at the beginning to get them working on mobile: we need to specify in the template the loading of these fonts, and we need to instruct them to be displayed via CSS. So let's jump into Section B.

Section B - Changing the template code to make the fonts show in the mobile view

1st - Add the fonts you are using to the blog template

First you need to make a list of which fonts you are actually using in your template. Again, ignore any of the basic ones listed above. Just make note of the special Google fonts you chose from the drop-down menus (in Template → Customize → Advanced).

For my example above, I was using Kenia, Syncopate, Cherry Cream Soda, Chewy, and Fontdiner Swanky.

For each of those, I need to enter a single line of code in my template (Template → Edit HTML). Look for this line near the top:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Just above it, we will place the lines for each font. The line looks like this, with FONTNAME replaced by your font:

2nd - Add the CSS code to display these fonts in the mobile template

Now we need to add our CSS to edit each section. This part can be annoying, since we need to do it manually for each part. For example, if you chose a special font for the blog title, we need to add a code entry for that -- one entry for each section we customized. Don't worry, just copy and paste from my example.

The end result is that the mobile template now essentially matches the desktop template view.

Final Thoughts

Now that you've done all this hard work of setting up the CSS for that mobile template, it's now very easy to tweak it by adding any other properties to any section to do other fun things. For example, from here you could very easily tweak the code to do things like:

center the blog title or post titles in mobile view

adjust the font sizes in the mobile view

adjust the colors of any particular section

change the alignment

And of course, any other CSS-based properties. Customize to your heart's content. Personally, I think centering all titles, increasing the font size of titles, and decreasing the font size of the post content, together looks best and more 'modern'. Blogger's default desktop view font sizes are too small, and the mobile template default sizes are too big. Fix it easily by tweaking this code.

Although all this is manageable, it's sure a lot of hoops to jump through. It's disappointing that the customizations you make in the Template Customizer don't automatically get reflected in the mobile template (most do; custom fonts do not). I hope Blogger will address this issue soon, and I believe they will. It seems some new default responsive templates are in the works, that will automatically adjust to the screen size. No more separate template code for Desktop and Mobile views! So this hassle may become obsolete soon. Let's hope so. (Update: Yes, the four new Blogger templates for 2017 do maintain font customizations, as they have no separate 'mobile' template to worry about.)

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Just for posterity, here was Google's live coverage of the election, a few minutes after it was called for Donald Trump.

Google's election coverage screenshot of Donald Trump elected

It was fun to get to follow along with this. Google should offer more real-time info on live events like this. If you ask me (and you didn't), Donald Trump is not the end of the world. Even if you disagree with him, the pendulum swings back and forth. Eight years of Clinton, eight years of Bush, eight years of Obama. Eight years of Trump?

Friday, November 4, 2016

I don't know why, but I thoroughly enjoyed this humble article, full of old ajusshi remembrances of their working man days as media workers. This penchant for nostalgia always gets me, and is one of the things I find endearing about Korea.

"I usually went there with two or three Korea Times staffers with whom I worked with at night for the city edition," said Son. "We would order one bottle of soju, along with a bowl of haejanggook (a meat soup with vegetables) as a side dish. A bottle of soju was good enough for us to continue our chat about our lives and families until the curfew was finally lifted."
- Curfew created unique nighttime culture in 1970s

Naver Blogs show English language follower box

In addition to normal RSS feeds, you can subscribe to Naver blogs via Naver's own follower service. You can then read these either in the app or get notified on the Naver homepage. Each blog has a Follower widget where you can see that blog's followers and become one yourself.

Recently I noticed that some blogs are now displaying the Follow widget in English. Here are two examples, one in Korean and one in English.

Naver Blogs follower widgets, in Korean and English

You can see for yourself. The above images were taken from these blogs:

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Naver's entertainment news section now features automatic, instant translations of netizen comments. Now can you read all the juicy gossip that real Koreans are saying, and since these are anonymous online comments, you know they are nothing but the highest quality.

Auto-translation of netizen comments

I only noticed this recently, so I'm not sure how long this has been available. Similar to how Facebook presents a small link to immediately translate foreign text into your language, comments left by netizens can be auto-translated with just a click. Here's an example:

Importance of context for good translations

Let's compare a bit. For all these examples I am using the article ['달의연인' 이준기X이지은, 반전은 없었다..죽음으로 새드엔딩[종합] :: 네이버 TV연예] because it was a #1 trending item today. Basically it was about the latest drama ("달의연인") that singer I.U. was in, which just finished, and how the ending was sad.

Here was the top comment on that article:

See that little underlined link there at the end? It reads 번역보기 ("View Translation") and when you click it, you get this:

Now obviously there's a problem here. That translation's not very clear. The netizen wrote 현대씬 나오길래 이어주나? 했더니 그냥 아이소이 광고용.

Naver's own translator translated this as "Would? was it comes hyeondaessin I just aisoi ㅋㅋㅋ for advertising" which matches the article's translation, so clearly these translations are coming from Naver's in-house translation tech.

Google translates it as "Do you keep coming out of the modern scene? I do not know how to do it, but I do not know how to do it," which is actually a little bit better.

Of course, there's something still missing. Really what the netizen was saying is "(I thought) the modern scene they showed was connected? It turns out it was just an advertisement for isoi."

The missing context is that a scene ran which appeared to show the characters in modern times [the setting for the drama was way back in the past; like most good K-dramas, there was plenty of the "romantic time travel" trope that Koreans love]. This led the commenting netizen (among many other fans of the show) to predict that the last episode would have the two leads traveling to the present together. But as it turned out, that scene was just a set-up for an advertisement for the ISOI brand of cosmetics, and didn't have bearing on the actual show's finale. Something like that.

Now granted, there's no way any computer translator could get that nuance. Heck I had to question multiple female coworkers just to understand it a bit myself. I don't know how people keep up with these things. I can barely remember to tie my shoes in the morning.

But going back to the comment I started with, the comment read 다른세계 다른시간에서 만났더라면 얼마나 좋았을까 ..ㅠㅠ.

Naver translated it as "How Would that other world I'd met in another time. ... ㅠㅠ"

Google translates it as "I wish I had met at another time in another world .. ㅠ".

That's pretty good, but I think (though I could be wrong) that the Korean habit of not specifying subjects is tripping up the auto-translation. I think it's more correct to render it as "If only they met in another world, another time, how wonderful it would be :-("

Multiple language translations

You can try this in a variety of languages. Right before the netizen comments start, there's a drop-down box for selecting your desired language. Right now it does Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, and Hindi.

Full article translations coming soon!

One more neat thing is that in the top-right of each article is a three-language box for choosing Korean, Japanese, or English. Though, I only see this on mobile versions of articles, not the desktop versions.

Right now it looks like many articles have Japanese translations - although I can't be sure if these are human-done or machine-done, since I don't speak Japanese. I tried several but couldn't find any that had English translations done (which suggests these are not machine translations). Instead, clicking for English gives a message that the English translation service is coming soon.

If that's true, this could be a big boon to Naver news since there's such a hungry demographic out there for K-pop news in English. This would likely put Naver in direct competition with sites like AllKpop that basically make their living off translating K-pop news. Maybe Naver wants a slice of that pie. I say go for it, since I've never forgiven AllKpop for removing their RSS feeds. Yes, I'm petty.

One more important thing is that I'm only talking here about Naver's entertainment news section, i.e. articles from the http://entertain.naver.com portal. As far as I can tell, this auto-translation of comments is not being offered in other news categories like national, society, etc.

Finally, check out the great blog Netizen Buzz for actual human-curated translations of netizen comments. In fact I just went there to copy the link and discovered that they've already done a post for this exact same article I was doing.